Today's News

After occupying Korea by force of arms early in the last century, the Japanese imperialists resorted to every possible means and method to impose their colonial rule on the Korean people.

A typical example was the extensive plunder of land.

At that time, more than 80 percent of the Korean population were peasants.

The Japanese reckoned that it was necessary to dominate the peasants in order to strengthen their colonial domination over Korea and, to this end, it was important to seize land, the main means of production of the peasants.

They cooked up the “provisional regulations governing the organization of land survey bureau” in the government-general of Korea in March 1910 and appointed a Japanese as the survey department chief of the bureau to conduct a comprehensive survey of land in Korea.

In August 1912, they issued the "land survey act" and its "enforcement regulations" to establish a colonial system of plundering the rural areas.

On this basis, they declared the land ownership recognized previously by the feudal government of Korea null and void and legalized that land ownership would be "acknowledged" only as to the land reported to and approved by them.

Since the method and procedures for the report concerning land ownership were so difficult and complicated, the land of many Korean peasants fell into the hands of the Japanese and pro-Japanese stooges. 

The land Japan seized from the peasants through the "land survey" amounted to more than one million hectares and large Japanese landowners that accounted for 20 percent in 1911 increased to 54 percent in 1921.

Through the brigandish “land survey” the Japanese hindered the development of agriculture in Korea, reduced its countryside to their source of raw materials and food supply base and viciously exploited the peasants.

Japan charged the peasants high farm and land rents and all other kinds of exacting levies, forced them to do unpaid compulsory labour and got them to suffer untold hardships in life through severe usurious exploitation. It pursued such deceptive agricultural policies as the “increased rice production plan” and “rural development movement” in order to plunder larger quantities of rice and shipped away to Japan not only the peasants’ food but seeds of grains on the pretext of “grain delivery to the government”.

The plunder Japan committed after promulgating the "land survey act" was a hideous criminal act of mercilessly trampling on the right to existence of the Koreans by seizing the economic lifeline of their country.

The statute of limitations does not apply to the crimes the Japanese imperialists committed in the past and Japan’s criminal past must be settled without fail.